Reinventing Fire


Book Description

Imagine fuel without fear. No climate change. No oil spills, no dead coalminers, no dirty air, no devastated lands, no lost wildlife. No energy poverty. No oil-fed wars, tyrannies, or terrorists. No leaking nuclear wastes or spreading nuclear weapons. Nothing to run out. Nothing to cut off. Nothing to worry about. Just energy abundance, benign and affordable, for all, forever. That richer, fairer, cooler, safer world is possible, practical, even profitable-because saving and replacing fossil fuels now works better and costs no more than buying and burning them. Reinventing Fire shows how business-motivated by profit, supported by civil society, sped by smart policy-can get the US completely off oil and coal by 2050, and later beyond natural gas as well. Authored by a world leader on energy and innovation, the book maps a robust path for integrating real, here-and-now, comprehensive energy solutions in four industries-transportation, buildings, electricity, and manufacturing-melding radically efficient energy use with reliable, secure, renewable energy supplies.Popular in tone and rooted in applied hope, Reinventing Fire shows how smart businesses are creating a potent, global, market-driven, and explosively growing movement to defossilize fuels. It points readers to trillions in savings over the next 40 years, and trillions more in new business opportunities.Whether you care most about national security, or jobs and competitive advantage, or climate and environment, this major contribution by world leaders in energy innovation offers startling innovations will support your values, inspire your support, and transform your sense of possibility.Pragmatic citizens today are more interested in outcomes than motives. Reinventing Fire answers this trans-ideological call. Whether you care most about national security, or jobs and competitive advantage, or climate and environment, its startling innovations will support your values, inspire your support, and transform your sense of possibility.




A Case for Electrifying Heat in End-use Residential Sector Towards Carbon-free Buildings


Book Description

Space and water heating account for nearly two-thirds of energy consumption in U.S. homes, and a large contributor to energy costs of end-use residential dwellings. Most home heating systems in the United States are fueled by fossil fuels - natural gas and fuel oil (heating oil) - representing more than 50 percent of all U.S. homes' heating. These heating systems result in higher greenhouse gas emissions than electric heating systems now, and the emissions difference will increase as the grid trends toward lower carbon intensity in the decades ahead. Electrification of residential heating systems, by eliminating site fossil fuel use for heating, provides an important element of ultimately achieving carbon-free buildings. The objective of this research is to analyze the heating load of end-use residential dwellings. The research for this thesis achieves this by first conducting a survey of energy usage profile of some residents in Boston, Massachusetts and Houston, Texas. It then applies a thermal model to simulate building heat load, which was used in developing an electrification cost model to verify and validate the case for electrification of residential dwellings. Thermal models were developed for two cities, Boston and Houston, having contrasting winter weather and electricity rates. The model simulated heat load demand and energy outputs from heat pumps in both cities and analyzed resulting data and potential tradeoffs compared with electric resistance and gas furnace heating systems. Results show that heat in residential dwellings using electric air-source heat pumps (ASHPs) is more cost-effective and energy efficient compared with other heating systems. Model analyses indicate that heat demand in residential dwellings, which increase as outside temperature decreases due to heat loss, is disproportionately higher at low temperatures because the performance of ASHPs drops with outside temperature. However, ASHP performance is higher in Houston compared to Boston due to milder winter temperatures in the former. And the "balance point" between heat load and energy output decreases as capacity of ASHP increases.




Accelerating Decarbonization of the U.S. Energy System


Book Description

The world is transforming its energy system from one dominated by fossil fuel combustion to one with net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary anthropogenic greenhouse gas. This energy transition is critical to mitigating climate change, protecting human health, and revitalizing the U.S. economy. To help policymakers, businesses, communities, and the public better understand what a net-zero transition would mean for the United States, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine convened a committee of experts to investigate how the U.S. could best decarbonize its transportation, electricity, buildings, and industrial sectors. This report, Accelerating Decarbonization of the United States Energy System, identifies key technological and socio-economic goals that must be achieved to put the United States on the path to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The report presents a policy blueprint outlining critical near-term actions for the first decade (2021-2030) of this 30-year effort, including ways to support communities that will be most impacted by the transition.




Real Prospects for Energy Efficiency in the United States


Book Description

America's economy and lifestyles have been shaped by the low prices and availability of energy. In the last decade, however, the prices of oil, natural gas, and coal have increased dramatically, leaving consumers and the industrial and service sectors looking for ways to reduce energy use. To achieve greater energy efficiency, we need technology, more informed consumers and producers, and investments in more energy-efficient industrial processes, businesses, residences, and transportation. As part of the America's Energy Future project, Real Prospects for Energy Efficiency in the United States examines the potential for reducing energy demand through improving efficiency by using existing technologies, technologies developed but not yet utilized widely, and prospective technologies. The book evaluates technologies based on their estimated times to initial commercial deployment, and provides an analysis of costs, barriers, and research needs. This quantitative characterization of technologies will guide policy makers toward planning the future of energy use in America. This book will also have much to offer to industry leaders, investors, environmentalists, and others looking for a practical diagnosis of energy efficiency possibilities.




Integration of Variable Energy Resources (Us Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Regulation) (Ferc) (2018 Edition)


Book Description

Integration of Variable Energy Resources (US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Regulation) (FERC) (2018 Edition) The Law Library presents the complete text of the Integration of Variable Energy Resources (US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Regulation) (FERC) (2018 Edition). Updated as of May 29, 2018 The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is amending the pro forma Open Access Transmission Tariff to remove unduly discriminatory practices and to ensure just and reasonable rates for Commission-jurisdictional services. Specifically, this Final Rule removes barriers to the integration of variable energy resources by requiring each public utility transmission provider to: offer intra-hourly transmission scheduling; and, incorporate provisions into the pro forma Large Generator Interconnection Agreement requiring interconnection customers whose generating facilities are variable energy resources to provide meteorological and forced outage data to the public utility transmission provider for the purpose of power production forecasting. This book contains: - The complete text of the Integration of Variable Energy Resources (US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Regulation) (FERC) (2018 Edition) - A table of contents with the page number of each section




Energy and Climate in the Urban Built Environment


Book Description

Both the number and percentage of people living in urban areas is growing rapidly. Up to half of the world's population is expected to be living in a city by the end of the century and there are over 170 cities in the world with populations over a million. Cities have a huge impact on the local climate and require vast quantities of energy to keep them functioning. The urban environment in turn has a big impact on the performance and needs of buildings. The size, scale and mechanism of these interactions is poorly understood and strategies to mitigate them are rarely implemented. This is the first comprehensive book to address these questions. It arises out of a programme of work (POLISTUDIES) carried out for the Save programme of the European Commission. Chapters describe not only the main problems encountered such as the heat island and canyon effects, but also a range of design solutions that can be adopted both to improve the energy performance and indoor air quality of individual buildings and to look at aspects of urban design that can reduce these climatic effects. The book concludes with some examples of innovative urban bioclimatic buildings. The project was co-ordinated by Professor Mat Santamouris from the University of Athens who is also the editor of the book. Other contributions are from the University of Thessaloniki, Greece, ENTPE, Lyons, France and the University of Stuttgart, Germany.




Transition to Sustainable Buildings


Book Description

Buildings are the largest energy consuming sector in the world, and account for over one-third of total final energy consumption and an equally important source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Achieving significant energy and emissions reduction in the buildings sector is a challenging but achievable policy goal. Transition to Sustainable Buildings presents detailed scenarios and strategies to 2050, and demonstrates how to reach deep energy and emissions reduction through a combination of best available technologies and intelligent public policy. This IEA study is an indispensible guide for decision makers, providing informative insights on: cost-effective options, key technologies and opportunities in the buildings sector; solutions for reducing electricity demand growth and flattening peak demand; effective energy efficiency policies and lessons learned from different countries; future trends and priorities for ASEAN, Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the United States; implementing a systems approach using innovative products in a cost effective manner; and pursuing whole-building (e.g. zero energy buildings) and advanced-component policies to initiate a fundamental shift in the way energy is consumed.




Sustainability and Health in Intelligent Buildings


Book Description

Sustainability and Health in Intelligent Buildings presents a comprehensive roadmap for designing and constructing high-performance clean energy-efficient buildings, including intelligence capabilities underpinned by smart power, 5G and Internet-of-Things technologies, environmental sensors, intelligent control strategies and cyber-physical security. This book includes a special emphasis on health pandemic resiliency that discusses strong engineering control strategies to respond and recover from infectious diseases like COVID-19. Sections cover the foundational aspects of healthy buildings, with a special emphasis on assessing indoor environmental qualities. In addition, it introduces the necessary principles that assist engineers and researchers in understanding and designing buildings that meet health and sustainability goals. - Describes the basic elements of building a digital ecosystem, along with informatics-driven performance architecture - Features various models used in the design of controllers for major systems such as HVAC and lighting - Explores the notion of building bioelectromagnetics to ensure health and safety from human exposure to EM fields




Consumer Durable Choice and the Demand for Electricity


Book Description

This book develops the theory of durable choice and utilization. The basic assumption is that the demand for energy is a derived demand arising through the production of household services. Durable choice is associated with the choice of a particular technology for providing the household service. Econometric systems are derived which capture both the discrete choice nature of appliance selection and the determination of continuous conditional demand.Using the National Interim Energy Consumption Survey (NIECS) from 1978, a nested logit model of room air-conditioning, central air-conditioning, space-heating and water heating is estimated. The estimated probability choice model is used to forecast the impacts of proposed building standards for newly constructed single family detached residences. A network thermal model provides unit energy consumptions for alternative heating and cooling systems across time. Monthly billing data matched to NIECS is analyzed permitting seasonal estimation of the demand for electricity and natural gas by households.The theory of price specification for demand subject to a declining rate structure is reviewed and tested. Finally, consistent estimation procedures are used in the presence of possible correlation between dummy variables indicating appliance ownership and the equation error. The hypothesis of simultaneity in the demand system is tested.Conditional moments in the generalized extreme value family are derived to extend discrete continuous econometric systems in which discrete choice is assumed logistic. An efficiency comparison of various two-stage consistent estimation techniques applied to a single equation of a dummy endogenous simultaneous equation system is undertaken and asymptotic distributions are derived for each estimation method.




Zero Net Energy Case Study Homes


Book Description

This is the first volume of in-depth case studies of zero-net-energy (ZNE) residential structures. Following the same descriptive approach and format of Volumes 1-3 of the previously published Zero Net Energy Case Study Buildings, this book focuses entirely on examples of housing archetypes in the United States. These include the single-family private house, one-off spec houses, manufactured housing, tract house developments and mixed-use multifamily projects. In this well-illustrated book, all the case study projects are described in terms of how they were built to achieve verified ZNE performance, that is, the energy used by the building over the course of a year was equal to the amount of energy supplied by its on-site renewable energy system. This book goes beyond recent publications on ZNE buildings with its reporting and analysis of the actual measured energy use and renewable energy production, including graphs and charts of this performance over a full year, verifying actual achievement of the zero-net-energy goal. As in the previous volumes, each case study concludes with a candid discussion of post-occupancy issues and "lessons learned" for the project. Enhanced by many beautiful photographs, architectural drawings and illustrations, it is attractive and easy to read, while still providing detailed technical information common to all the case study residential projects.